Thread: TeamPlayerGaming Folding Team

Ok, so, no I have no doubt that I am addicted to this. I just popped $90 on NewEgg so for some quiet case fans, some rubber case fan screws, and a new quiet HSF for my server so that it is not so loud while folding. now maybe a CPU upgrade is in order....

sent from my Droid because all my computers are too busy Folding@Home

Gumby, will your motherboard support a 2nd GPU?

I am taking a break for this afternoon. I have some encoding jobs that are going to keep my CPU around 100% for the rest of the afternoon. It just gets too warm having the GPUs there too.

I will also be enjoying a little Portal 2 this evening, but folding will resume for me when I go to sleep. That should give you guys a chance to try and catch up.

Originally Posted by HeavyG

Gumby, will your motherboard support a 2nd GPU?

yes. I am planning on dropping another 6870 in there soon enough. The one I got (and its soon to be twin) is an XFX model with a non-reference cooler that is hard to hear even on 100% power.

I think it would be interesting to hear about everyone else's folding lineup. I will start.
On my main desktop, I am running the CPU system tray and the GPU system tray. The CPU is a Phenom II X4 at 3.2 Ghz. The GPU is a Radeon HD 6870 at 900 Mhz
I have a HyperV server that I built with an Athlon II X4 620. It is hosting two folding VMs. One is an XP VM with two Virtual CPUs running the SMP command line version and the other is my Windows Home Server running the systray version.
I am also running the PS3 folding too. The upgrades I mentioned earlier are for the hyperV box so It can run full speed ahead all the time without driving me crazy.

I am running my two GTX 570s through system tray (for pure convenience to pause, resume, etc). They are both clocked at 950 MHz vs the 732 stock clocks. I have my CPU, Core i7-870 @ 4.0 GHz for 24x7 use, set to run -smp -bigadv through console, but that makes my temps pretty high, so I only do it when I go to bed and let it fold overnight (take the side case panel off).

Otherwise, I run the standard system tray running with my GPUs during the day so I don't generate too much heat. Keep in mind that I work from home, so I need to keep my office comfortable and sometimes the heat is just too much.

I should have another box up in a few weeks, just as long as funds can support. I have some other projects I am working on in the house that need some capital investment (flooring for dining room/living room), and since I just dropped over $900 into water cooling stuff over the past month and a half, I am pretty much on lock down on buying PC stuff... at least for a few weeks.

By far, the GPUs are making the biggest difference. I crank out a couple WUs every hour to hour and half. The CPU WUs just take forever and don't give as many points.

And I lied... I have my GPUs folding at the moment while I have some encoding jobs going on my PC. Things might get a little toasty for a bit. Gonna go do some yard work while this is going on. This shit is addictive, and for a good cause.

Holy crap, GPU is so much faster than CPU. Will get it setup on my other 2 systems this evening, then might actually have some decent scores.

PS3 and GPU are by far the fastest for me so far.

Hey guys! I saw this thread and set up my GPU and 1 CPU core folding and see how system stability was over 24 hours. I had no issues, and currently GPU temp is 83C and my hottest core is 52C-56C. That was with a fairly poor cooling setup (i.e. the back vent of my CPU was 6 inches from the wall because I had put it off to the side when I had guests over) so I repositioned it back to where it gets good air flow and will start loading on a second core. I'm loading with a 8800 GT GPU and a Q6600 (G0 stepping which was 'the good one' when I was buying it 3 years ago) intel quad-core CPU. The GPU is definitely the heavy lifter so far, it does so much more work than the CPU. I downloaded the .msi file for CPU and GPU and left them both running without any command line tweaks, so if anyone has some advice to get more efficient use of what I have let me know. I will be following the FAQ for "If the CPU loading is working fine, here's how to get other CPUs loading at the same time by copying the setup."

Edit: Saw this in the FAQ. Interesting stuff!

GPU's are Graphics Processing Units -- chips used in today's PC's to help speed high performance graphics, such as 3D games or 3D scientific visualization. GPUs have the possibility to perform an enormous number of Floating Point OPerations (FLOPs). However, they achieve this high performance by losing generality -- there are only certain types of calculations which would be well-suited to GPUs. However, after much work, we have been able to write a highly optimized molecular dynamics code for GPU's, achieving a 20x to 40x speed increase over comparable CPU code for certain types of calculations in FAH. This means that we will be able to make an enormous advance over what we could do only just a few years ago.